February 29, 2012 AT 8:47 am

Raspberry Pi announces new partners

The Raspberry Pi Foundation, creator of the Raspberry Pi ARM-based tiny computer that sells for $25, has announced that it has signed up Premier Farnell and RS Componentsas licensed manufacturers of the devices. The Foundation explained that the new model would remove the limitations of its previous supply model which meant it could only do batches of ten thousand Raspberry Pis a time, and that from now on, the device would be manufactured to meet demand. The Foundation will make a small profit from each Raspberry Pi sale which will be put back into the charity to help it achieve its educational mission.

…Although Raspberry Pi boards are designed with open source software in mind, with a remix of Fedora Linux being developed for it, the boards themselves are not open source hardware. The Foundation hopes to make the board open later on, with a release of the whole design, but is concentrating of building a sustainable educational foundation.

13 Comments

@k – they have not opened it up for distributors – so far they’ve only announced licensed manufacture partnerships with premier farnell and rs components. if you have a contact at rasberry please let us know.

Please consider becoming a distributor if they will let you. Tried to “pre-order” earlier today. The product is completely lost in the vastness of Premier Farnell and RS Components. Adafruit is perfect to get it into the hands of makers. Thanks.

I live currently in SE Asia (GMT+7) when Raspberry Pi started the “Sale”. Disaster – the Singapore site for Farnell “Element-14” or whatever they’re calling themselves this week worked, even with a splash for the RPi buy – but clicking the link resulted in a failed page load from their UK site. RS Singapore took awhile to come up, no reference to RPi at all, even with a search. I called Element-14 Singapore to order over the phone, they had no clue about this.

The worse part is netiher RS or Element-14 offer registered post from Singapore as a shipping option as far as I can determine. This means shipping will cost far more than the RPi board itself.

Sigh…

I’m disappointed, but complaining. The decision to sell the Raspberry Pi through established electronic parts fulfillment houses is a good one in my opinion, except for the shipping cost issue.

I hope the Raspberry Pi people aren’t getting in trouble with their distributors over the level of demand and the headaches it’s causing. I could see Farnell’s or Newark’s regular customers being a little miffed that they can’t place their normal orders until this DDOS dies down.

I also think it’s sad to see so much anger directed at Pi because of the bumpy launch. Not here so much, but it’s around. Some people just seem so entitled.

If there’s a $50 minimum and a limit of 1 per customer, wouldn’t it make sense to order $15 worth of other parts rather than paying $20 shipping? I’ve had no problem bumping a $50 order up to $200 at Mouser to avoid the same sort of charge. It’s like an excuse to go shopping!

The $20 fee from Newark Electronics is not a minimum order fee, it is a handling fee. The product will be direct-shipped from the UK to your US address. The fee is in lieu of a shipping charge and applies per-order, not per-item.

Howdy, just to clarify, there is no minimum order amount for Newark. The $20 UK direct ship for the Raspberry Pi was done in error and will be refunded. This FAQ should answer most questions for those who ordered or are interesting in ordering from Premier Farnell’s global brands (Farnell/Newark/element14):